Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (22 page)

“Her name is
Karen.
Refer to her as a
bitch again, and I have the Chief here cut off one of your balls.”
Jake growled.

George pulled the Tanto style blade from its
sheath at the small of his back, then lazily proceeded to clean his
fingernails with it, never taking his eyes from the bloodied
raider.

“So,” Jake pressed, “let's talk about your
little butt-buddy friends. Especially this
Milo
...”

* * *

When Jake returned to the Mimi's hangar later
that afternoon, he looked awful.

Laurel and Rae had just about finished
putting Gwen, her friend Donna, Penny, and George's niece Beatrix
through a round of weapons training when he stumbled in. The writer
shook visibly. Before his lover could ask him what was wrong, he
darted to a nearby waste barrel and began vomiting into it
noisily.

Leaving Rae to finish up with the others,
Laurel hurried to his side as he continued to be violently sick.
She stroked his back as he leaned over the steel container, muscles
clenching in time with his purging gut, giving him what comfort she
could while his stomach emptied.

Worry began to gnaw at her. With the
exception of Foster and Jake (up until that point), each of the
survivors had bazooka-barfed
.
Allan coined that phrase,
after his spew of truly epic proportion. This seemed different. For
one, he didn't stink to high-heaven.

One of the bad things about a zombie
apocalypse—as if there could be anything
good
involved with
the dead walking around eating people—was the smell. They stank.
Badly. If you encountered a thousand of the creatures on the street
(after which, you'd probably be very, very dead) and picked a
zombie at random, every single one of the others who were about to
start chewing on your appendages would smell exactly like it.
Laurel could only compare it to the aroma achieved by dumping a
moldy pig's carcass into a twenty gallon vat of human excrement.
George and the writer had never shown any reaction to it before,
however. They'd barely flinched when they came back down from the
tenement once, covered in goo from the Hungry, Hungry Hippies on
one of the upper floors, which was why the redhead was concerned as
he dry-heaved the last of the spasms away.

O'Connor spat into the barrel a few times,
head hanging below his shoulders limply, as he recovered. Laurel
handed him a shop-rag she'd grabbed on her trot over, and Jake took
it gratefully to wipe his mouth.

She'd guided him away from the others, to the
staircase leading up to the roof. They were halfway up the metal
steps before he noticed Laurel had a bottle of Jameson's in her
hand. After climbing through and securing the access hatch, she
pulled him towards the far end of the roof, and sat him down on a
familiar ventilation duct. Uncorking the whiskey, Laurel handed him
the bottle.

“Swish and spit.”

Jake did as he was ordered, going so far as
to gargle before spitting the second mouthful out over the edge of
the roof. Then he downed a large swallow while sitting eyes closed
on the air vent, concentrating on the warm sting of the whiskey as
it flowed down his esophagus.

Laurel took the bottle back and capped it.
“Tell me.”

He didn't speak at first. When his voice
finally pushed its way from his throat, it was numb and weary. Like
an opium addict's, after a dose twice their normal size.

“The raiders are based just southwest of
Mount Pisgah, in the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Lake utilities
complex. The location is roughly sixteen miles southeast of the
city. There are sixty-four to sixty-eight of them left, after you
discount the ones we took out at the water treatment plant.” He
pulled out a cigarette, but his hands were shaking so badly that he
couldn't hold his lighter steady. Laurel took the Zippo from his
trembling fingers, flicked it to life, lit the cigarette for him,
and put the lighter back in his vest pocket.

“Thank you.” Jake inhaled sweet nicotine
before he continued. “Their leader's name is William Poole. He used
to be big in white supremacy circles. Poole was in Columbus for an
Aryan Republic Army fundraiser in early May, preachin' the truth to
some corn-fed morons, when all hell broke loose. He was the one
involved in a failed attempt to link the group with the Fifth Reich
a few years back.”

Laurel frowned. “I've never heard of
them.”

“It's not surprising,” O'Connor said, blowing
smoke out of his lungs to drift away with the warm breeze. “They're
one of those '
run silent, run deep'
organizations. They stay
out of public affairs, don't have membership drives, and don't
endorse the campaigns of politicians. Normally, they try to work
within the system, attempting to change state policy to further
their skewered interests.”

“What? Like the white man's Illuminati?”
Laurel suggested.

“Not far off the mark. The raider we grabbed
in Mulberry had been with Poole for a little over two years. He was
banished from the inner circle when their hate-mongering leader
contracted a gun for hire. Some guy by the name of Milo Tompkins.
That's Mr. Skinhead, who lead the attack on Rae's place. He's also
the one who took Karen away from the waste treatment plant.” Jake
flicked the American Spirit over the edge of the roof. “What I
can't understand is, why not take Maggie and Allen too? And why
leave ten men in a facility fourteen miles from their headquarters,
guarding a pair of captives that could easily be secured at your
home base?”

“That is weird,” Laurel agreed, pushing the
persistent lock of red hair away from her face again. “Do you think
maybe our friend in the tower is just playing dumb? I mean, if he
was close with this Poole for so long, he should have
some
idea…”

“Trust me,” Jake said, voice still numb with
shock, “if he'd known any more, he would've talked.”

Laurel's eyes narrowed. “Would've?”

He was staring into the distance, eyes
unfocused and unseeing. “George is reviewing the notes he took now.
He said he'd be along. After he cleans up.”

The redhead moved to stand before him and
cupped his jaw with her hands, bringing his face up. “Jake? What
happened?”

He began to shake again and kept his eyes
averted as he told the story.

The raider had spilled his guts.

Seeing George's knife come out had loosened
Henry's tongue remarkably. He'd given up not only Poole's location
and manpower resources, but also a list of the supplies and
weaponry the hostile party had acquired. Between completely looting
a National Guard armory and several large sporting goods stores,
the raiders were in decent shape. Nearly all of them, with the
exception of six female captives, were members of the Purifiers, as
Henry dubbed them. Any survivors the group had come across were
either killed outright for having the bad taste to be born as
anything other than Anglo-Saxon, or—if of the proper
stock
—
absorbed into the man's little pack of killers.

A few had refused, citing that the
dead
don't give a shit what color somebody's skin is
. They'd been
tied to vehicles and left to die from exposure. More likely though,
they had been consumed, or turned into ghouls themselves.

Henry also informed them that when the
Purifiers had attacked Rae's cache, they'd been given strict
instructions to take everyone they could, especially Jake, alive.
Poole told them, without any hope of misunderstanding by even the
most mentally-challenged of his followers, that he wanted the
writer brought to him whole and unharmed.

Laurel's eyes widened. “Why??”

“I have no idea,” Jake replied. “I've never
met the man. I've never talked with him on the phone. I've never
even sent him a postcard.”

Once the Purifiers had taken their people
back to the waste treatment plant, Tompkins (Skinhead) had split
the party, telling those who remained that they'd be relieved in a
couple of days. The man had left them some supplies, stuck Karen in
the back of the lead armored car, ordered his men to load into the
other vehicles, then hit the road south towards the Ohio-Kentucky
border, fourteen miles distant.

Henry had also explained Maggie's bloody
appearance when Jake and the women had assaulted their
location.

He (Henry) and another man by the name of
Pete Herbert, had decided to have a little fun during Allen's
beating. The two had dragged the blonde woman, kicking and cursing
at them all the way, into the office next door for a quickie.

“He didn't want to talk about
that
very much,” Jake explained. “It took some convincing.”

“How so?” Laurel asked.

He shrugged. “Foster was going to cut off his
d—”

“I...! Get the picture,” she replied
quickly.

As it turned out, even though her hands were
still secured behind her back, Maggie had put up such a fight the
pair had given up on trying to get her out of her clothes. Henry
forced her to her knees while Pete had doffed his weapons, and then
undone his pants. The raider had then ordered her to
start
sucking the golf ball through the garden hose
. The buxom EMT's
response had been to call the man a pencil-dick, which had prompted
Pete to smack her harshly. He'd given her half a dozen or so
heavy-handed slaps, partially stunning her and—while she tried get
the gears in her brain turning again—shoved himself into her
mouth.

Pete Herbert's high scream had quickly
brought most of the other guards running. They found Henry dragging
his companion into the hall, who was trailing a thick smear of
blood and clutching his groin. Maggie was still knelt in the
office, covered in blood from nose to navel, grinning savagely.
There was something small and meaty on the floor between her knees.
A trio of Purifiers had thrown her back in the cell with the
then-unconscious Allen and carried the screaming Pete
downstairs.

The man bled out a short time later, and a
couple of the other raiders had dumped his body in one of the waste
plant's filtration pools like the sack of shit he was.

“When he told us about that, George pulled
his pistol out to shoot the bastard, right there,” Jake told her.
“I didn't let him.”

“Okay?” Laurel prompted.

“I let him loose.”

“You
what??”

“I didn't say I let him go,” the writer said.
“I cut him free, gave him my knife, and told him if he could get by
me, George would let him out through the airport gate.”

“
And that's supposed to make me feel
better?”
She exclaimed, then quickly looked him over for stab
wounds and cuts. Seeing none, Laurel took a calming series of
breaths. “I take it Henry didn't manage to turn you into a
pincushion?”

He finally looked up at her miserably. “I
killed him, Laurel. I beat him to
death
.” Jake held up his
hands, displaying bloody knuckles and road-rash-like scrapes.

The redhead's eyes widened perceptibly.

“I- I couldn't stop. George tried to keep me
from... I threw him across the
room.”

Her jaw dropped. Foster was no lightweight.
“Is he alright?”

“Yeah. Told me I hit like a girl, after he
woke up again.”

The redhead nodded with amusement. “Yep, he's
fine.”

He looked at her shamefaced. “I don't like
the person I'm becoming, Laurel. He's not a nice guy. Who is this
fucked up, nightmare of what used to be our world turning me
into?”

“Jake—”

“I'm afraid.” He choked out, trembling
violently.

Laurel crushed him against her, wrapping her
arms around his neck and shoulders. He clung to her; feeling like
his sanity was trying to fall over the precipice like an unbalanced
car. Just after it got the shit smashed out of it by an
eighteen-wheeler.

“I don't know how much more of this I can
take,” Jake told her, his face buried against Laurel's collarbone.
“I'm changing. And not in a good way.”

“We've all changed, a little,” she replied
softly, laying her cheek against the top of his unruly hair. “I
never
thought I'd become so good with a gun. Now, I'm
dropping infected at fifty yards. It happens as people grow. Even
without the world coming to an end. Heck, George actually used the
phrase
thank you
yesterday.”

That caused the man in her arms to chuckle
halfheartedly and wrap his own around Laurel's waist. They remained
that way for some time.

Laurel tended to forget just how crushing the
mantle of leadership was for Jake. Being
The One In Charge
was not something he'd wanted. The writer had all but begged Foster
to take on the role due to his greater experience, but the aging
fixer just grinned at his requests and said,
I know my limits,
kid.
It also didn't help that Jake had barely slept since
leaving Rae's junkyard safe-house. Laurel brought his face up from
her bosom with one hand and studied it closely. He was developing a
cleft in the center of his brow from frowning most of the time, and
pair of dark circles were blooming heavily under his lower lids.
Those strangely-pale, compelling eyes of his closed as Laurel
lowered her head down to brush his lips with her own.

His arms stayed locked around her slim hips,
as Jake let her control the kiss. It was pleasantly slow, with none
of the frantic, teenage rushing so common between relatively new
couples during moments of intimacy. Some minutes later, she pulled
back to see a smile on his face.

“Much better.” She slid her hands along the
back of his neck, kneading at the still partially-knotted muscles
she found there.

“You know something?” Jake asked and settled
closer in her arms. “Zombies aside, the last month has been almost
perfect.”

“How's that?” Laurel murmured against his
lips.